Universal Harvester(10)
Lisa leaned in to get a better look, then looked over at Sarah Jane. “I guess,” she said. “Looks more or less like it. Pretty blurry.”
“But this”—pointing now at the woman in the picture, her eyes a flash of panic in the grid—“this isn’t you?”
Lisa laughed. “No, no,” she said. She kept her eyes on the printout. “This must be from sometime before I got here.”
The dot matrix wasn’t great: if you didn’t know what you were supposed to be looking at, you might have had trouble defining the features of the person pictured, the face in the grain. But Sarah Jane had watched the sequence several times, concentrating hard. She’d traced the contours with her eyes and she knew what she was seeing now. She was sure of it.
They stood together there, in the place Sarah Jane knew beyond question was the set of the spliced-in scenes from the tapes, and nobody said anything for a minute.
“Huh,” said Sarah Jane. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother,” Lisa Sample said, reaching for the light switch as she headed back out toward the yard. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? There’s coffee inside.”
There is a variation on this story so pervasive that it’s sometimes thought of not as a variation but as the central thread. In it, Sarah Jane returns to Video Hut a little after five, and describes for Jeremy much of what she saw in Collins. But she leaves out several important details: that the house in question is directly across the road from Bob Pietsch’s place; that she stood waiting at the farmhouse’s front door for several minutes before knocking on it; that the woman who answered was named Lisa, and that they’d spent much of the afternoon together in her living room. The story Sarah Jane brings home from Collins is deliberately incomplete, but she presents it with an air of totality, as if there were no more to say.
Jeremy’s disappointed, but what can he do? He is out of ideas. Maybe the scenes on the tapes dry up, and in subsequent years he regards the entire episode as a momentary fancy, something he dreamed up because he was young and bored. This is the nail over which this particular variation’s tires inevitably drive: Jeremy was young, but not so young. His mother’s accident had taken care of that. And while his classmates from school had itched always for action, hitting the highway for Minneapolis or Chicago every weekend as soon as they could drive, he had stayed home. When he imagined himself all grown up, he saw himself in Nevada, maybe owning a store, or managing a business in Des Moines. If he thought of the future at all, it looked like the present. And so the young, bored Jeremy of the Nothing Happened variation rings false, and I put more stock in the one I see this afternoon, standing behind the counter eating a sandwich, reading through the classified ads in The Des Moines Register: the Jeremy who’s there when Sarah Jane gets back from Collins, throwing herself wildly through the door of Video Hut as though seeking shelter, her eyes wide, her face darting deerlike first to the right, now to the left, the story she brings so fresh with the terror of its insult that she takes over an hour to tell it, like a person who’s saying things out loud to make sure she won’t forget them: a person testing the things in her mind against the hard surfaces of the world before venturing to claim that yes, they’re true and real, and have form, and shape, and weight, and meaning.
7
“The hood—it was right there on the chair—not the chair, a real chair, an old one, big wooden one—right there, right there in the hallway.”
“I—”
“She asked me in”—here extending her hand, water, anything, Jeremy looking around, finally grabbing the thirty-two-ounce Coke he’d brought back from Dairy Queen with lunch and handing it to her—“and the house looked normal, she’s normal, but all the things, they’re right there—” and here, putting her palm to her face, testing it with her fingers. She had a scratch on her cheek, a roundish abraded blotch.
“Slow down,” Jeremy said. His mother’d said that to him when he’d had bad dreams as a child. Slow down. Tell me about it.
“I went to the house,” she said.
“The house?”
“It was right there.”
“Slow down.”
“Those scenes on the tapes, the ones you said.”
“What house.”
“You can see a house. It’s not there for long but you can see it, I saw it. It clicked right away. I—”
“Slow down.”
“When she’s getting up, in the one scene.” She extended her arms, mimicking the hooded figure’s rise to her feet. “In the other one, too. If you freeze the tape, there’s a house. I froze the tape. I grew up out there. I know that house.”
She drew soda up through the straw in huge gulps.
“I grew up out there,” she said again. She looked at Jeremy, making sure he was there to bear witness. “That place has been there since I was a kid.”
“Collins?” said Jeremy.
“The house,” said Sarah Jane, reaching back into her purse and retrieving the printout of the frame from when my hand slipped and the front porch came into view.
*
A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side. Seen from the road, buttressed by its fields, it bequeaths order to the frame: those fields, now that a farmhouse sits squarely in their midst, are there for someone. They’re justified. Inside—in the narrow entry hall; in the kitchen opening onto the living room; upstairs—there’s a lived-in feel; the house is there for the fields outside its windows. Coffee cans on pantry shelves, clean dishtowels embroidered with roosters or the sun and smartly draped over the handle of the stove—when, here, did people not live like this?